SOME
months ago Parveen Talha, the senior-most Muslim woman in the IAS and
the big boss of Customs and Excise posted in Aurangabad, told me of a
strange experience. She said, "You know for some months every train
at every stop on the way to Nanded (Maharashtra) has young sardars
entering all compartments to serve daal and roti to
passengers free of charge. The daal is delicious. Who are these
people?" I did not know but I told her that Nanded was one of the
five takhts (thrones) of the Khalsa Panth; it has a huge gurdwara
commemorating the assassination of their last Guru, Guru Gobind Singh,
in 1708. I was intrigued and also happy that I belonged to the community
of daal-roti servers.

A couple of weeks ago,
Mrs Charanjit Singh, who lives in New Friends Colony, told me:
"Every morning I go to my office in Le Meridien (she is chairman of
the hotel), my car is held up near the dargah of Hazrat
Nizamuddin Auliya because of a mob of hungry beggars milling round
trucks loaded with daal-roti and rice which is distributed to
them by a few young sardars. I donít know who they are but I know most
of the crowd consists of local Muslims or Bangladeshis." I was more
intrigued and asked her to find out who was organising this free guru-ka-langar
by the roadside. The next day, she rang me up and told me "it
is someone known as Sant Tarlochan Singh." She gave me his
telephone number.

I got Sant Tarlochan Singh on
the phone. "I donít want any publicity," he told me bluntly,
"It takes away any merit you may gain through sewa (service)."
I persisted. "You did not ring me up. I rang you. I want to know more about
you and what you do." He relented but put off the meeting because he had
fractured his leg while starting a seminar langar-cum-clinicat
Bareilly for bonded labourers working in brick kilns. A week later, he was able
to move with the use of a walker and came to see me with his son Kamaljeet
Singh, a strapping young man in his mid-thirties.

Tarlochan Singh is 67, a tall
man dressed in white from his turban, kurta down to the pajamas.
He has a silken white beard flowing to his navel. He looks every inch a sant.
"I donít like to be called a sant, I prefer to be known as veerjee
(elder brother)," he said with a broad smile. His residence is known as
Veerjee Da Dera but his ashram is known as Santgarh (Santís fortress).
It is here that cooking of large quantities of rice, daal and chapattis
starts every evening and rounds off by the early hours of next morning. It
is then transported by trucks to different parts of the city and Delhi railway
station. The queue outside Sis Ganj extends half a mile in either side. Veerjee
himself sets out, broom in hand, on a round of the cityís gurdwaras to sweep
floors and say his prayers. I asked what had inspired him to undertake his
mission to feed the hungry. Without hesitation he replied, "Mother Teresa.
I came to look upon her as my own mother and wanted to follow her example."

Tarlochan Singh had many turns
and twists in his life. He was born in Maudalay (Burma) in 1935, the son of a
prosperous timber contractor. Maudalay was bombed by the Japanese in 1942. He
saw his own sister killed by a shrapnel. The family migrated back to their
ancestral village in Ludhiana district. Tarlochan did his matriculation from his
village school, went on to Government College, Ludhiana, for a degree in
engineering and joined the Punjab Works Department. In 1962, he was posted as an
overseer in Delhi and was at the Pusa Agricultural Institute. He retired in
1998. Eight years before his retirement, he started on his mission to feed the
poor. Now it has become a full-time occupation. "Where the poor are taken
care of, there is Thy grace seen," he says quoting Guru Nanak on the
existence of God. "He fills pitchers that are empty and empties pitchers
that are full."

"Where does the money for
this massive operation come from?" I asked. He raised both his hands and
replied, "God gives all I ask for." This is exactly how Mother Teresa
had answered the same question when I put it to her. Mother Teresa had the
Missionaries of Charity to which anyone could make his or her donation.
Tarlochan Singh has no such organisation and bluntly refuses to take money from
anyone. "If you want to give anything, give me atta (flour), rice,
daal or medicines," he replied. His son Kamaljeet Singh who is a
jewellery designer by profession promised to give me a list of medicines they
needed. When will I have the time to go and buy medicines in bulk and deliver
them at Santgarh or Veerjee Da Dera, God alone knows.

In any event no list was sent
to me. God, who provided Tarlochan Singh with rations for the poor, now also
provides medicines for the sick. He tends to them himself; his clinic is the
pavement beside the Chandani Chowk entrance of Gurdwara Sis Ganj.

Ingratitude

Nirad Chaudhuri who was for
some time Private Secretary to Netajiís brother, Sarat Chandra Bose, told me
of his bossís reaction to a man who had been saying nasty things about him.
"I did not do him any favours, why should he run me down?" When put
the other way, it means that if you do some good to anyone he is bound to hold
it against you for ever. To start with he may thank you and say he will remain
beholden to you for ever, but that does not last for too long. Kindness received
is very hard to digest. It is not gratitude but ingratitude that is ingrained in
human nature. Such perversity is not found among other living creatures.

I was never in positions from
where I could extend patronage and do favours to people. So I do not have many
people gunning for me behind my back. But from the little I learnt from life, I
would say that not all people you do good to are ungrateful. Most remain
beholden to you as I remain beholden to people who were good to me. There were
only a few, very few, who betrayed my trust and stabbed me in the back to gain
their own ends or maligned me whenever they could. Such acts of betrayal baffled
me because I felt I had not done anything to deserve them. The most persistent
of my denigrators is a fellow who was arrested a few months before the Emergency
was lifted. Although I supported the Emergency when it was first imposed, I felt
his arrest and detention were unwarranted. With a few friends I raised money to
help his wife run her home while he was in prison. When he was let out and was
without a job, I invited him to write for The Illustrated Weekly of India so
that he could get some income. I was in for a nasty surprise. Both the man and
his wife denounced me. "I never wanted his filthy money," his wife
spat out in an interview to the Press. However, neither the man nor his wife
thought of returning it to me. And he lets go at me in the most vituperative
language he can. It saddens me. I recall Mark Twainís observation: "If
you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that
is the principal difference between a dog and a man."